Makers Precourse: Week 2

The River Cam

​So I’ve finished the second week of Makers Precourse. Not gonna lie, this week was a lot harder than last week. I have finally dragged myself through the 40th chapter of Learn Ruby the Hard Way and a kicking back with a well-earned Franziskaner. FYI, LRTHW is hard, and I just bought Chris Pine’s Learn to Program on Amazon, in actual book format which I shall mark up with a highlighter, because I think I need more practice. I even went back to Code Academy to have a look at their explanations for things — boy is anything easier than LRTHW.

My thoughts from this week:
- Fixed growth mindset is so important: our coach shared this fantastic Ted Talk which you should all watch.
https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve .

The phrase “effort + difficulty = new neural connections” really resonates with me. Programming is hard, but I look back on this week and I think of all the things I’ve learned that I couldn’t do before and that’s pretty cool.

— Some katas on Code Wars are easy and some are beasts. Choose wisely, and take an ally.

- Pair programming is great. I did my first pair session today and having another head on a problem is really helpful.

— It’s really important to understand what a piece of code does, rather than just call it blindly. Thanks to Gus, who spent two hours explaining arrays over Slack to me to make sure I REALLY understood everything before calling a function to do the dirty work for me.

— However, why not take the programming outside and work through with a pen and paper while being surrounded by daffodils?

​ — I might have given myself a pep talk as though I were a Starfleet officer.

— I’m trying not to go too crazy on the Precourse, simply because I know the course is going to be MEGA intense. So stopping when my brain says enough and making sure to have fun is important!

— My FitBit is totally getting me out of the house!

Until next week
​Paula